Presentation by Bob Jones at PANDAAS2 Workshop to promote Helix Nebula Science Cloud for Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP)

2. The Helix Nebula Science Cloud
Pre Commercial Procurement
Project
13 July 2016
Bob Jones, CERN
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution‐ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This work is co‐funded by H2020 Grant Agreement 687614
The content of this presentation is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily
represent the views expressed by the European Commission or its services.

3. The Helix Nebula Science Cloud
public‐private partnership

4. 4
Augmenting CERN’s scientific computing
programme with commercial cloud services
Open Telekom Cloud

5. The Helix Nebula Initiative
The preferred model for public research
organisations is a hybrid cloud that combines
in‐house resources with public e‐
infrastructures and commercial cloud services
5
The Helix Nebula initiative has
brought together research
organisations, data providers,
publicly funded e‐
infrastructures and European
commercial cloud service
providers to develop a hybrid
cloud model with
procurement and governance
approaches suitable for the
dynamic cloud market
In‐house

6. Procurement Process
PCP
A more flexible and agile
procurement process must be
created and implemented to
speed up the uptake of cloud
services for the research sector
See PICSE roadmap and call to action
http://www.picse.eu/

7. HNSciCloud Joint Pre‐Commercial Procurement
Bob Jones, CERN 7
Procurers: CERN, CNRS, DESY, EMBL‐EBI, ESRF,
IFAE, INFN, KIT, SURFSara, STFC
Experts: Trust‐IT & EGI.eu
The group of procurers have committed
• >1.6M€ of procurement funds
• Manpower for testing/evaluation
• Use‐cases with applications & data
• In‐house IT resources
To procure innovative IaaS level cloud services
integrated into a hybrid cloud model
• Commercial cloud services
• European e‐Infrastructures
Services will be made available to end‐users
from many research communities
Co‐funded via H2020 Grant Agreement 687614
Total procurement budget >5.3M€

8. Focus is on IaaS level services
Bob Jones, CERN 8
HNSciCloud
PCP
Source: CloudComputing for Govies, DLT Solutions, David Blankenhorn, Van Ristau and Caron Beesley

9. High Energy Physics
WLCG & LHC experiments
Belle II, COMPASS, ILC
Astronomy
CTA – Cherenkov Telescope Array
MAGIC
Pierre Auger Observatory
Life Sciences
ELIXIR
Euro‐BioImaging
Pan‐Cancer
BBMRI
WeNMR
Photon/Neutron science
PETRA III, European XFEL, 3DIX, OCEAN, OSIRIS
Long tail of science
Etc.
User groups to be supported
http://www.hnscicloud.eu/hnscicloud‐user‐groups

10. Open Market Consultation
Pre‐Commercial Procurement is
about procuring innovative services
which are not yet on the market
Need to understand what is
important to the procurers and what
is available from suppliers
30+ companies participated to the
event on 17 March 2016 @ CERN
25+ use‐cases were assessed for
innovation and technological risk
See report
http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.51592
Bob Jones, CERN 10

11. Challenges
Innovative IaaS level cloud services integrated with procurers in‐house
resources and public e‐infrastructure to support a range of scientific
workloads
Compute and Storage
support a range of virtual machine and container configurations
working with datasets in the petabyte range
Network Connectivity and Federated Identity Management
provide high‐end network capacity for the whole platform with
common identity and access management
Service Payment Models
explore a range of purchasing options to determine the most
appropriate ones for the scientific application workloads that will be
deployed
Bob Jones, CERN 11

12. High Level Architecture of the Hybrid Cloud
Platform including the R&D challenges
Bob Jones, CERN 12

13. Pre‐Commercial Procurement
Process and Timeline
7/13/2016 13

14. Competitive Tender
Contracts in each phase (design, prototype, pilot)
awarded to multiple contractors (4, 3, 2) using
Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT) criterion
Contractors will not be required to integrate their services
with those of competing contractors
Tender published by 20 July 2016
Information Session @ CERN 7 September 2016
Deadline for bid submission 19 September 2016
7/13/2016 14

15. Evaluation of Procured Services
All procurers will participate in the evaluation of the
procured services
Design – WP3 led by CNRS (2016Q4 ‐ 2017Q1)
Prototype – WP4 led by DESY (2017H2)
Pilot – WP5 led by INFN (2018)
EGI.eu will chair a user board to gather feedback
Test‐plans for the prototype and pilot phases will be
produced at the start of the relevant WP
7/13/2016 15

16. Summary
Bob Jones, CERN 16
Commercial cloud services are expected to play an increasing
role in the computing models of research communities
PICSE has identified changes to the procurement process in
the public research sector that are necessary to benefit from a
commercial cloud services market
A hybrid cloud platform has the potential to serve many
research communities and their downstream industries
Helix Nebula Science Cloud is the first in a foreseen series of
EC co‐funded projects which will contribute to the European
Cloud Initiative
The HNSciCloud tender will be published in July 2016

17. Accelerating Science and InnovationAccelerating Science and Innovation